Recently, while skimming through an article I came across a sentence which is as follows.
The five minute walk will connect you with life.
My rationale says it should have been "five minutes" & not "five minute". Kindly advise where am I going wrong?
Answer
J.R. and Ingmar are both correct, but I'd like add to what they've said by defining some of the terms involved. Overall, it's quite common for nouns to modify other nouns.
The five minute walk will connect you with life.
Because five and minute don't agree in number, you can tell that these words are being used differently than they ordinarily would be. The reason they aren't in agreement is that they represent one, compound word. The words are to be taken collectively, in other words. They do still follow the rule that modifiers need to agree in number, and while not obvious, they do agree in number. That is to say that five-minute agrees with a walk.
The plural, in your example, would be the five-minute walks.
The five-minute walks that I take daily are therapeutic.
And as others have pointed out, five-minute is being used as one whole unit to modify walk. Although some writers choose to hyphenate noun adjuncts such as this to indicate they are a compound modifier, a hyphen is not required. I usually recommend using hyphens, but ultimately, it's a style choice. If the meaning of the sentence can change significantly when the words are not viewed in sum as a single modifier, then they should be hyphenated for clarity.
While adjectives are the most common part of speech used to modify nouns, they are not the only part of speech that can do so. In this case, the subject of your sentence is the entire noun-clause five-minute walk, and five minute is quantifying the walk by indicating the length of the walk in terms of time.
These words are most commonly referred to as attributive nouns or noun adjuncts
My rationale says it should have been "five minutes" & not "five minute". Kindly advise where am I going wrong? Thank you.
When you say five minutes, you're using five differently. And while you're still using this pair as a combined modifier, you're actually changing how they are modifying the nouns walk and walking. You know that they are to be considered separately because they do agree in number.
Compare the following:
This five minute walk will connect you with life.
-versus-
These five minutes of walking will connect you with life.
In the first sentence, this five-minute walk is emphasizing that this is a walk that takes five minutes to complete. Similarly, other nouns can used to quantify walk in other ways. While five minute walk quantifies walk temporally, people often say that they go for 5k or 3 mile walks/runs to quantify the distance. Either way, you're emphasizing length/duration.
In the second sentence these five minutes still modifies walking, but in this case five also modifies minutes itself, which is why they must agree in number. But they're still working as a compound modifier in that they indicate the length of the walk.
You'll note that it follows the same rule in that the pair of nouns don't agree in number. You either go for a 5k/3.1 mile walk, or you walk 3.1 miles, with walk being a verb in the latter.
The Chicago Manual of Style Online, 16th Ed. has a good explanation of attributive nouns. They don't suggest whether or not the adjuncts should be hyphenated, so if you're following The Chicago Manual's style, then hyphenating the words is completely optional. I'll link the site, but since it's subscription-based (another pair of attributive nouns), I'll copy and paste the text directly below:
5.22 Nouns as adjectives
Words that are ordinarily nouns sometimes function as other parts of speech, such as adjectives or verbs. A noun-to-adjective shift takes place when a noun modifies another noun {the morning newspaper} {a state legislature} {a varsity sport} (morning, state, and varsity function as adjectives). These are also termed attributive nouns. Occasionally the use of a noun as an adjective can produce an ambiguity. For example, the phrase fast results can be read as meaning either “rapid results” or (less probably but possibly) “the outcome of a fast.” Sometimes the noun and its adjectival form can be used interchangeably—for example, prostate cancer and prostatic cancer both refer to cancer of the prostate gland. But sometimes the use of the noun instead of the adjective may alter the meaning—for instance, a study group is not necessarily a studious group. A preposition may be needed to indicate a noun’s relationship to other sentence elements. But if the noun functions as an adjective, the preposition must be omitted; at times this can result in a vague phrase—for example, voter awareness (awareness of voters or by them?). Context might suggest what preposition is implied, but a reader may have to deduce the writer’s meaning.
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